The Scientific Blue period

"It means nothing to me. I have no opinion about it, and I don't care"

~ Pablo Picasso

“In the corner of the moon's face, a rocket is firmly stuck”, a very famous poster that gained widespread fame in 1902. The film was titled 'Le voyage dans la lune,' and it was produced by the renowned French expressionist filmmaker and pioneer of cinema, Georges Méliès. This cinematic masterpiece, from the early days of the film industry, marked the inception of the Space Sci-fi genre, leaving an indelible mark on both the art and contemporary societal imagination.

Like any form of art, it exerted an influence on the prevailing culture of its time, yet it remained unparalleled. It did not deviate from the norm, but rather ignited a tremendous enthusiasm for lunar exploration among the masses. Concurrently, in the backdrop of the pre-war period, rapid advancements in science and technology were gearing up to materialize this very aspiration.

However, as time progressed, that aspiration was fulfilled. 'Humanity' managed to leave its mark on the lunar soil, apparently a significant symbol of the highest aspirations of human civilization. Subsequent chapters in the story of human enlightenment saw further steps towards reason and emancipation.

However, in this capitalist state's stage of neo-enlightenment, there exists a persistent flaw. As Adorno and Horkheimer discussed in 'Dialectic of Enlightenment,' even in this context, their statement holds considerable relevance: 'Every rational progressive force has a tendency to turn into a regressive irrational force.' It became evident in the post-1968 Cold War period. During wartime, science became one of the repressive tools of the State. However, in the post-war era, people had already recognized the ominous nature of technology in the realm of science, which could turn into a threat for any capitalist or imperialist state. To eradicate this social deviance which could prove to be a threat for the homogeneity propagated by the state , popular media and Hollywood played the ideological apparatuses of the state.

In 1968, the immediate American response was Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey,' a film that merely served as a facade for the U.S. government's technocratic survivalist space scientism and American nationalism.

At the same time, another notable Soviet film, 'Solaris' by Andrei Tarkovsky (based on Stanislaw Lem's novel), highlighted a dialectical point of view on scientific progress, creating a rivalry between the Soviet and American approaches.

During these circumstances, even beyond cinema, the renowned rock band Pink Floyd, led by Roger Waters, named their newly formed album 'Dark Side of the Moon.' This choice was heavily criticized within the artistic community.

The allure of the moon still captivates people today. Recent successes like India's Chandrayan-3 mission and the subsequent greening of the Delhi slum area with a touch of green tarpaulins during the G-20 summit show that the people eager to witness moon's marvels are also ones to hide the state's flaws once again.

We live in the twilight of a crisis-ridden capitalism, a system rotting under the weight of its own contradictions. The great markets of the world, once teeming with the vitality of expansion, now lie exhausted, saturated, incapable of yielding the boundless profits once promised. In its desperation, capital turns upon itself, seeking to commodify not merely labour and land, but the very essence of life: memory, desire, even the farthest reaches of imagination. This is no longer the brutal primitive accumulation that tore peasants from the soil and laid the foundations of modern exploitation; it is a later, more grotesque mutational vampiric hunger that feeds on every last uncommodified fragment of existence.

Within this context, the much-celebrated Chandrayan missions and their counterparts abroad reveal their true character. Draped in the rhetoric of scientific progress and national pride, they are, in essence, the feverish gambits of a ruling class searching for new frontiers to plunder. Space, cast as the “final frontier,” becomes a barren theatre for capital’s last illusions: a place to dream of new markets, new resources, new lifelines for a system choking on its own surplus. Yet these celestial ventures offer no salvation, only the mirage of relief.

As Marx reminded us in Capital, capitalism survives its crises only to stumble headlong into deeper ones. Each temporary reprieve is purchased at the cost of amplifying its contradictions, each apparent triumph concealing the seeds of a still greater catastrophe.

It proves that despite recent scientific advancements and logical thinking, true progress in science and rationalism hasn't been achieved. The science that was supposed to liberate humanity and catalyse its process of historical social evolution has long been discarded. This non-utilitarian scientism for the masses, bears no resemblance to the Francis Baconian philosophy, which has been entirely co-opted by capitalism and its agents, ultimately leading to an empty abyss, akin to Fritz Lang's 'Metropolis'.